The present invention relates to a character or pattern recognition apparatus for recognizing characters or graphic patterns (hereinafter referred to as characters or character patterns) and, more particularly, to apparatus for recognizing characters through logic processing of video signals generated from the characters or character patterns by an image pickup device such as an industrial television (ITV) camera.
It is generally desirable that the pattern recognition apparatus be able to recognize characters and patterns at a high rate and accurately. The applicant has already proposed such a character recognition apparatus in commonly owned, copending U.S. application Ser. No. 504,263, now U.S. Pat. No. 4,556,985, issued on Dec. 3, 1985, which is incorporated herein by reference.
In character recognition apparatus, it is preferable to be able to design a character recognition algorithm easily, and also to easily expand the kinds of characters to be recognized. However, such an increase in the kinds of characters is not easy to achieve in conventional character recognition apparatus. This is because the settings such as the standard bit matrix ##EQU1## the mask bit matrix ##EQU2## and the deformation operator D.sup.K, as described hereinafter, are limited and determined in advance according to characters to be recognized, and once they are set, they cannot be revised easily.
The present invention overcomes the foregoing shortcomings of the prior art. It is an object of the present invention to provide a character recognition apparatus which can determine and adjust parameter settings more easily, and to permit an increase in the kinds of characters to be recognized, that is, to facilitate enlargement of the settings.